Teijin’s New Fabric Boasts Lightweight And Premium Black Color

November 22, 2017

TOKYO — November 20, 2017 — Teijin Frontier Co. Ltd., the Teijin group’s fiber-product converting company announced today that it has developed new fabric, boasting a premium black color that is expected to meet demands for lightweight, easy-care formal wear.

Up to now, it was difficult to reduce a fabric’s weight while retaining its deep black color for use as formal wear. The reason was that the fabric had to be shrunk to prevent light reflection and increase its density to achieve a deep black color, making it unsuitable for formal black wear by its weight.

Teijin Frontier’s solution optimizes the fiber, the fabric structure and the post-dyeing processing technology in lightweight, premium black fabric. To realize a premium black color, the company developed a new polyester combined-filament yarn by incorporating a new polymer technology and a new yarn-processing technology with orientation control. Light reflection was suppressed by lowering the refractive index and using thin-film fabrication processing to make the yarn bulky, so low transparency is achieved without shrinkage of the fabric.

In the development stage, Teijin Frontier produced a deep black color by greatly shrinking the yarn, but this raised the fiber’s density and increased its contact area, which led to whitening due to friction. Later, however, the thread structure was redesigned for less shrinkage and finer yarn threads. Reduced shrinkage and greater bulkiness decreased whitening surface.

Teijin Frontier is now exploring marketing opportunities and sample sales for formal black wear. Annual sales are expected to reach JPY 200 million ($1.76 million) by the fiscal year ending in March 2020.